Saturday, July 15, 2017

Thyssenkrupp's New Elevator Moves Diagonally (and horizontally)

But at that point—moving horizontally—it's probably not an "elevator".

From CityLab, July 12:

Can This Elevator Help Designers Sidestep Tall-Building Problems?

Thyssenkrupp’s design travels horizontally and diagonally, in addition
to up and down, freeing up square footage that would otherwise be
commandeered for a shaft. But is it a whole new mode of transit?

Half
the world’s population already lives in cities, and that number is
expected to jump to 70 percent by the end of the century. To accommodate
the new urban dwellers, cities will have to build higher—and that will
mean doubling down on ways to transport residents from the ground up
into the sky.

The medieval town of Rottweil, in rural South Germany, may seem like
an odd place to contemplate the high-tech future. (The locale’s claim to
fame is breeding the Rottweiler dog.) But Thyssenkrupp, an industrial
company based out of Essen, managed to do so last month, at a flashy
event promising to change how we design, build, and occupy tall
buildings.

“For 150 years, elevators have been dominated by ropes,” says Andreas
Schierenbeck, CEO of Thyssenkrupp Elevator. It’s technology that by
now, most of the world knows well: cables hoist a car up and down the
elevator shaft, making stops along the way.

But with this promise of increasing urbanization, Thyssenkrupp sought
to fill an opportunity to make tall buildings more efficient. Their new
technology, known as MULTI, throws out the traditional elevator
configuration in favor of a ropeless system that can move both
horizontally and vertically. The conventional steel rope most elevators
run on adds considerable weight to a building, and becomes more strained
the taller you build, ultimately restricting a tower's overall height.
By eliminating the cables—and the height restrictions that come with
them—Thyssenkrupp executives brag it’s a technology that could send “an
elevator up to the moon.” Indeed, it’s the stuff of Star Trek and Willy Wonka—but it could eventually make its way to a city near you.

The
company unveiled a functioning MULTI system at Thyssenkrupp’s
807-foot-tall concrete test tower, which has been a proving ground for
the system over the past two-and-a-half years. The result is an elevator
utilizing the same magnetic technology that moves Japan’s Bullet Train.
In this model, elevator cars—not unlike train cars—move along magnetic
tracks, uninhibited by traditional cables. Linear motors and a
multiple-level brake system replace cables. Cabs are able to change
direction from vertical to horizontal thanks to a rotating “exchanger.”....MORE